We’ve entered that period, which occurs every summer, when the news media focuses a little too much on stories that wouldn’t survive a second news cycle during the rest of the year. Sort of like spending that extra hour in the sun and getting burned.
One such story: the hue-and-cry over discovery that New Yorker magazine blogger Jonah Lehrer self-plagiarized. That means he copied his own writing and published it again for a different blog.
Apparently it isn’t the first time Master Lehrer’s been caught doodling himself. Double shame! And even if his editor at TNY says the matter is done, Lehrer will pay a price or two for some time to come.
But the whole distasteful episode raises a question about another kind of recycling: reusing the same video in different stories for different sites. If you assume that images are as important, as informative as the voiced script or text, then should those images be repeated over and again simply to provide a visual background?
It’s done all the time; known as wallpapering in TV news. You know: talk about terrorism, show Al Qaeda Training video. Talk about holiday shopping, show the old mall video.
So we’re all guilty of applying layer upon layer of video wallpaper, and worse, of out-and-out video plagiarism. But in the same breath, NY Times reporter Charles Duhigg makes a point.
After all, have you every heard a reporter say:
“Gimme write, Sweetheart.”